Oy vay, so in other words you continue adding services (you forgot virtualization) to these dedicated servers until they are effectively private clouds. Genius!

Like I said earlier the difference between a cloud and dedicated servers is mainly in the business model.

Lets say a developer makes an online game. If they choose to use dedicated servers they need a sufficient amount of them to serve their players (either setting up there own or renting) so lets say the get enough for 200 000 players. The issue here is that if they have less then 200 000 online they are wasting resources and if there are more then 200 000 then there has to either be a queue or the game starts to lag (meaning they need to build/rent more servers).

The way the CLOUD works is that you pay for the use. So they need for example 2Tflops of computation and 5GB of memory per player. Now they pay for 2Teraflops of computation and 5GB of server resources if there is only 1 player online and if there is 1 000 0000 players online they pay for 4.76837 Petabytes of memory and 100 petaflops of compute.

Now the way Microsoft is doing things is basically giving developers the 4,8Tflops/24GB per player for free. M$ is guaranteeing that there servers will have at least this amount of capacity no matter how many units of XBO are sold (if it sell well they will have to setup more servers).

But this does not effect what can be done server side. If it can be done with the M$ CLOUD it can be done with dedicated servers. The network latency does not magically disappear. If developers need more server side resources then standard amount then they will have to re-negotiate with M$ or look for servers elsewhere (assuming M$ would let them).Edited by Bit_reaper - 6/25/13 at 3:10pm

From an interview with the devs: The cloud can "scale up and down automatically as players come and go. We can upload new programs for them to run and they handle the deployment for us. And they’ll host our game servers for other platforms, too!" This applies to all three versions of Titanfall -- Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PC.

From an interview with the devs: The cloud can "scale up and down automatically as players come and go. We can upload new programs for them to run and they handle the deployment for us. And they’ll host our game servers for other platforms, too!" This applies to all three versions of Titanfall -- Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PC.

Now this guy has a great point and I've been trying to address it on Polygon, Engadget, and Reddit without much traction. It's important to stress what this "cloud" crap means to gamers and the tangible benefits, beyond offloading to the cloud for hosted servers in multiplayer.

So one example, you’ll notice in games that trees, people, grass, and environmental effects that are at an extreme distance have a very low fidelity or almost GIF like appearance (stadium crowds, racing game environments/fans, waterfalls and trees in distance etc) That is because there just isn't enough horsepower in a single machine (PS4 and yes high end PC's included) to calculate and render that many polygons, particles, etc at such scale. Now imagine you have 300,000+ servers with Xeon E5-2600’s (or similar CPUs) and AMD/NVDA GPU’s rendering those landscapes dynamically.

Weather, wind, environmental disasters impact distant areas at incredible fidelity and the immediate multiplayer map around you at the same time. IE a tornado starts tearing up a farm in the distance with realistic physics (Cloud), trees sway (Cloud), wind (Cloud + XB1) effects the gun casings flying out of your M16 and houses are blown apart. The tornado continues into the immediate vicinity (now entirely XB1, distant areas are still cloud processed). Since the player isn't impacting those distant areas, there is no need for low latency interaction and can be cloud processed. All of the physics and graphics in that scenario is made possible by offloading that processing to the servers in the “cloud” while as effects get closer to the player the console takes over. So expect much higher fidelity environments, realistic crowds, vast physics enabled scenarios, ridiculously expansive levels, and a hell of alot more that I can't even begin to predict.

Look at what was accomplished with the second gen consoles over the last 7 years and imagine what's possible with the horsepower of an ever expanding cloud infrastructure. The key here is, Sony does not have that capability. Sure devs can use Azure or alternatives but will not get the benefits of being on XLive and XB1..

These servers are practically only CPU. There won't be any rendering going on...

It has nothing to do with expansive levels, you can't offload level loading into the cloud. Streaming environments from the HDD has been possible for a long time now. And latency prevents it being used for physics, unless you like watching the physics kick in a second later. For sure it could be used for weather, where physics arn't dependent on player interaction and hence no perceivable physics lag, but that is just about the only use I see for it, and that can be done on dedicated servers too, since CPU is just CPU. It can be used for AI/crowds too, just like dedicated servers have been doing for the last 10 years.

Basically, it offers nothing new, except devs can use a free server instead of having to host their own.Edited by .:hybrid:. - 6/26/13 at 3:09am